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2002-11-23Loose EndsMono. The Open-Source implementation of the .NET Development Framework. Right now they have a C# compiler, a CLR implementation, and a set of class libraries. These are in a variety of stages, but there is interesting movement. This should not be confused with Roter, which is the Shared-Source implementation supported by Microsoft and not satisfying the Open-Source Definition.Lulu Press: The Premier Self-Publishing On-Demand Printing Press. Hmm, my very own on-line vanity press. This is an interesting concept. Not sure where to go with it. A very interesting idea, though. Scholarship and CollegialityOn-Line ResourcesArsDigita UniversityAbout ArsDigita University: A Comprehensive Information Page by Andrew Bangert (graduate). A great summary of the experiment, with many liinks.Day Blog (schoolyard subversion) ArsDigita University Review. Here's an interesting report of what it was like to attend. ADUni.org: Free Computer Science Resources. Here's the ArsDigita University site (ASUni.org). The description of the purpose of the effort and the potential next steps is encouraging. It is interesting to think of this as the inspiration for MIT's open courseware initiative. In neither case is it presumed that the materials are sufficient by themselves - working with a teacher-mentor would seem to be indispensible, and ArsDigita had the advantage of proximity to the Harvard and MIT communities. Nevertheless, there is something great about the transparency of these efforts, along lines that have always fit with the ideals of scholarship and of collegiality. ArsDigita University. Here's a great summary about ArsDigita university and the availability of all curriculum materials from their 1-year intensive undergraduate curriculum in Computer Science. 2002-11-22Confirmable ExperienceCentrale System UpgradingCompagno configuration updateWell, today is the day that I have promised myself to have Compagno, my 1998-model Dell Inspiron 7000 Laptop upgraded to Windows XP Professional.The challenge is to (1) back up everything that I have that must be preserved, (2) locate everything that will have to be reinstalled, and (3) do a clean install on a reformatted hard disk. The Windows XP Upgrade Advisor comes up with very few things that I need to be concerned about. With laptops, I wonder, especially because of special drivers, touch pad, etc. I intend to be very careful. The goal is to have a basic Windows XP Professional system running on Compagno, with the minimum I need to be back in operation. I will do an inventory that identifies that and lets me take it from there. The critical elements are the conversion of Personal Web Server 4.0 to IIS, locking down IIS, and then having my web-site development back in operation. There is very little work that I do that is not carried out on or reported via the Web. Once I have Compagno upgraded, I will come up with an upgrade plan for the remaining two Wintel configurations: Vicki's Liberta machine, probably the simplest of all to upgrade, and then Centro, my main desktop system with the scanner, printer, DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives. The biggest concern may be my SoundBlaster Live! board and what it takes to have proper drivers operating on XP along with Cakewalk Sonar 2.1. But that will be then. Now, today, it is the laptop. CollaborationKnowledge and Coordinated ActivityOpen collaboration valueKnowledge Isn't Power, says Xerox. That's the paraphrase of an article title elsewhere on the Internet. One thing I couldn't find in the coverage is the actual source, the research report that Xerox sponsored. I would definitely want to have access to the source rather than two levels-removed of interpretations about it. The Xerox Corporation home page was no help.CoWorking. There is reference to Coworking Continued and I don't understand that subtlety. Maybe it is an inside joke. This is one of the sites being promoted by Gerrit, who sent out some notices about sharing and win-win approaches. Knowledge Board: Why open collaboration is key. - 12 Nov 2002. This article is a little startling. I found it via a referal on the Coworking Yahoo Group. I am molto simpatico with this line of thinking, so I have to watch my objectivity. One thing that I notice is that sometimes I see these startling affirmative statements and then, the next thing I see is some proposed action or system approach that seems to be unrelated if not downright antithetical to the expressed vision. I don't say that is happening here, though I see hints of it. I am reminded of something that Ivan Illich seems to suggest in Deschooling Society. I am thinking of our having institutions that, at some point, actually defeat the very purpose that is the goal expressed for them. I need to remind myself that it is commonplace for us to want to pass through the next door using the tools that got us to that doorway. We want to use what we know. In some cases, especially if we are out to fix something that is seen as wrong or broken, there is this insidious tendency to become what we oppose as the presumed way to overcome whatever that is. A memorable case for me, in a work setting, was listening to the language and posture of people who were out to take an organization from Capability Maturity Model level 1 to level 2. The language and the approach was coercive. As far as I can tell, the corporate-wide effort also failed. A better example arises in my personal life. I have been in conversations where someone is talking about "not being pushed around" and "standing up for themselves." There is anger and an apparent desire to force something. That is to say, push someone around. It is after all, the model that the self-identified victim sees as being successful. This ties back to the karma aspect of warfare: "The problem with warfare is that it teaches the vanquished that violence succeeds." 2002-11-21Document ProcessingInteroperabilityMetadata for images and picturesPicture Metadata Toolkit. Something I just ran into that I need to let my associate, Bernard Chester, know about.Setting up ActiveODMA on SourceForgeSourceForge.net: D5. Using SourceForge.net: from logging-in to account maintenance. [2002-11-22] Taking a little break, here is a page that I want my ActiveODMA participants to know about.activeodma.sourceforge.net. There is an automatic subdomain available to the ActiveODMA project. We could put a web site here, taking advantage of this being an Apache server. We can also put something here that is specifically ActiveODMA. Some web-situated ActiveODMA fixture of some sort, perhaps? SourceForge.net: Forums for ActiveODMA. I think I am repeating myself, but I know more about how this works now. This is a reminder to see if anyone can use a forum, not just people registered as ActiveODMA participants. We will try that out when I am logged out as administrator. SourceForge.net: Mailing Lists for ActiveODMA. This is where people can go to subscribe to the activeodma-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net mailing list. The interface is fairly straightforward, including good advice about the kind of password to use here. Remember the e-mail address that you use here, because you need it to perform any maintenance of your subscription. SourceForge.net: Guide to the File Release System (FRS). Information on how to post releases that I may need to review for ActiveODMA. I am not sure if this page is public, but I bet it is. SourceForge.net: Project Web Services: Displaying the SourceForge.net Logo. This is the page that explains how to set up a SourceForge logo and how to use the proper link definition so that SourceForge statistics on project visits can be kept. The key thing I found out here is that the logo, even though it counts as an access to ActiveODMA every time the image is fetched, must be in a link to SourceForge so that people can find out about SourceForge.net. I can't use it to link directly to the project. Fair enough. The logo that is displayed below is actually not part of ActiveODMA, so I will need to alter it somehow so that it does create spurious statistics on SourceForge. I'll do that as soon as I have the logo up in the proper place on ODMA.info. Using the SourceForge logo And now for the SourceForge.net logo: This is a link to SourceForge, using the appropriate logo. This will generate inappropriate hits and I will remedy that at some point. This is what is needed to refer to the logo from ActiveODMA web pages, and I will set that up. [I just noticed this is still here, generating false hits for ActiveODMA. I changed the link to refer to group 1 (slashdot itself) to see if that is benign. Otherwise, I need to take the image off of my blog page. -- dh:2002-11-26-14:26] SourceForge.net: Forums for ActiveODMA. I'm gathering some clippings for ActiveODMA projects that I want to cultivate. This one has been lying fallow. We are going for Winter Wheat! AIM to host workshop on number theoretic algorithms. The workshop, announced on October 30, will be held March 24-28, 2003. OSDN Network Gallery. I want to update some materials on SourceForge, and also provide some instructions for people to use in accessing one of my projects. But it is so slow right now that I can't get connections or, once connected, can't reliably follow links within the site. I got here from Slashdot while looking to see what else might be having trouble or whether there is a known problem reported somewhere. Apparently not. I gave up on trying to follow the link to sf.net on this page! Tuning up SourceForge for ActiveODMAIt is time to liven up the ActiveODMA project on SourceForge.net.I thought I would check out the lists and forums and prime them for use, and then move on to connecting up the project. I am getting server or DNS problems, and it may be because I am using SSL for my access. I am going to relogon without SSL and see if that helps at all, or whether mid-day during the week is just not the time to be here. System too bloody slow. SourceForge.net is running bloody slow right now and I have been unsuccessful making simple additions to my developer diary. It makes blogger look really good, and I think I'll make a diary entry about that. There. SourceForge.net: My Diary And Notes I notice that ActiveODMA is listed on my personal page as having a red X through the disk. I think that simply means the project has not published any files. That makes sense. It won't for a while, unless planning material is posted this way. (That seems superior to the docs feature of SourceForge which is not like anything I think of as docs!). Computational LiteracyCP4E: Computer Programming for EveryoneSome contendors?Programming the Fibonacci Numbers. Kirby Unger has been discussing the appeal that Ken Iverson's J Language has for him. Kirby has promoted Python in the teaching of mathematics, and he finds that J has many qualities that work in that regard. Here's an example that might be a mean feat in either Boxer or Logo.Boxer. Well, people start talking about Logo versus Python and up pops REBOL and now Boxer. I haven't checked to see how this is delivered on, though I like the idea of being based on a literacy model: `Boxer is the first example of a "computational medium" for real people -- not just for computer experts. Boxer is based on a literacy model. That is, we want computational media to be useful to everyone, as text is, except we want to extend from a static and linear tradition to a new, dynamic and interactive medium. Students, teachers and materials developers should all be able to use, create, combine and modify computational forms of unprecedented expressiveness and flexibility. Boxer's literacy model is aimed at life-long learning and use: Learn it once; use it forever. Boxer contains a completely integrated set of facilities for the broadest possible range of human intellectual activities.;acute; REBOL Language Overview. Someone said, in a discussion about languages for use in teaching children, that whatever language would be adopted for simple use, it would look like REBOL. So I am taking a look. I don't think this is it, and there are some nice things to dig into about REBOL. 2002-11-20Distributed Collaborative SystemsCyberspaceConvergence on ubiquitous objectsGrid Computing Planet: News: Internet, Grid To Forge Brave New Computing World. PriceWaterhouseCoopers predicts that there will be a convergence of grid computing, computing as a utility, voice-over-Internet, and pervasive/ubiquitous computing. Three key enablers are considered to be the increase in commodity-technology capabilities, scalalbe computing and communications infrastructures, and flexibility-reliability-manageability of those infrastructures. It is claimed that grid computing will solve inter-enterprise problems.It would seem that we quickly need a better model of what can be counted on for distributed operation, especially in the area of trusted computation. Metadata and ontology systemsWeb Ontology Language (OWL) Reference Version 1.0. The specification of a "semantic markup language for publishing and sharing ontologies on the World Wide Web. OWL is derived from the DAML + OIL Web Ontology Language and builds upon the Resource Description Framework [RDF]."There is more at the RDF section of the W3C site (below), including links to OWL material. Resource Description Framework (RDF) / W3C Semantic Web Activity. Collection of specifications, supporting documents, and some nice icons. For W3C, it's a question of semantics - Tech News - CNET.com. "In its continuing effort to make the Web more intelligent, the medium's leading standards group has published a series of drafts relevant to its Semantic Web activity. But don't call it artificial intelligence." A report on changes to RDF and OWL in supporting the Semantic Web effort. Trust and TrustworthinessVulnerability of the netComdex: Panel says to accept the Net is vulnerable "Companies and home Internet users need to accept that the global computer network is inherently vulnerable to attacks, worms, trojans and anything else miscreants want to unleash on it, and then accept that securing the system is everyone's responsibility, a panel of security experts said here Monday at the Comdex trade show."Bruce Scheier was there and charged vendors with not caring about security. The difficulty of social engineering around security was also acknowledged and it is assumed that full security is unachievable and that a sufficient level must be achieved without assuming conscienscious, well-behaved users. Two other items of note. First, the security industry is reactive rather than addressing security in some other, anticipatory way. Secondly, we are doing a poor job on security standards and specifications. Education, Instruction, Schooling, Training, DevelopmentContinuing on information related to effective education. I am quite taken with what Peter Denning has said about his experience as a teacher and mentor.Importance of MentoringRobert Aiken has been involved in computer science education for some time, contributing to the ACM curriculum activities and activities of SIGCSE. His remarks provide a lot to think about.&nbs; I think there are assumptions that educators have about the need-to-be-educated that is also worth examing.ACM: Ubiquity - Robert Aiken on the Future of Learning. "One of the things that I'm convinced of, as we look at the impact of distance education and long-distance learning, is that the one-on-one, mentoring aspect of being an educator is more important than ever. A lot can be achieved in long-distance learning with certain courses and modes of teaching. However, I think much of education still revolves around the teacher interacting directly with students. Some of that needs to happen face-to-face; especially at the undergraduate level." A new Ubiquity clipping. Since I am about to begin an on-line degree program, I am keen to see how we deal with the absence of face-to-face interaction. Loose Endstoptools datasheets. Relative to autodiscovery of networks, here is a network management package that provides desktop and device management. Promoted as applying to H-P hardware, TopTools is apparently more broadly usable than that.Artifact Software - conveniently collaborate with members of a global code sharing network. Reuse source code and components, leverage developer expertise. Interesting idea. I don't understand why I need a special client. Trust versus trustworthinessI ran across something this morning that reminds me of the important difference between trust and trustworthiness. If businesses knew how trust were defined in security circles, they would get crazy about it. It seems valuable to point out the distinction.Who do you trust? The old-books on computer-system security point out that a "trusted system" is one that is capable of violating trust. Think about it: A system that is incapable of violating trust in some matter does not require trust. It is useful to inspect the language that we use in this area, word by word and perspective by perspective. What is it to be trusted? When something is trusted, it does not mean that it is trustworthy. What it means is that it is trusted. That says someone or something is operating with some entity on the assumption that it is trustworthy. That is, the trusting party relies on the conditions of trust not being breached. Moreover, the trusting party is willingly vulnerable to such a breach based on the assumed degree of trustworthiness of the trusted system. So to be trusted is to be adjudged trustworthy in some matter to a degree that the trusting party is willing to tolerate -- be vulnerable to -- the prospect and consequences of a breach. Trust lies in the possibility of breach. Although it is easy to see how we want there to be some kind of absolute, unbreachable trustworthiness as something that is objectively real, it should also be clear that our language around trust is about the possibility of its breach. "I trusted you!" is not a complaint that would exist in soap opera or life were the situation one of absolute trustworthiness. The seeming paradox is that in matters of absolute trustworthiness, no degree of trust is required. Trust is necessary. It is not possible to operate as a human being without trusting. I trust that the sun will rise tomorrow. Some may say it is a fact that the sun will rise tomorrow, and I would counter that it is not a fact until the sun does rise tomorrow. But the larger aspect of trust, lunking in that observation, is that, from the perspective of the individual -- namely, me -- I am trusting that I will be here to confirm that fact. It may be a matter of interest that the sun rises whether I am here or not, but it is not a matter that requires any trust on my part. It has no impact on me. (It is also the likely case that if the sun does not rise tomorrow, I will probably not be here to observe it. There might not even be any here here. Either way, it is unlikely to be a matter of concern for me.) Trust is a relationship. There is the trusting one, the trusted one, and the matter that is the context/basis of the trust. Consider the case of a trusted system. Let us assume that there is some rational basis for presuming that there are safeguards in place in the design and operation of the trusted party (or in the behavior of a trusted person) such that trust is merited. This means that the trusting party will forego some safeguards. If this is a rational trust relationship, then presumably the impact of a breach is tolerable in contrast with the cost of regarding the trusted party as untrustworthy. Trust is noisy. By this I mean that there is no absolute approach to even rational trust. There are errors of type A, concluding untrustworthiness (with respect to appropriate criteria) when conditions of trustworthiness are satisfied. There are errors of type B, concluding trustworthiness (again, with respect to the appropriate criteria) when the conditions are actually not satisfied. And so on. Trust is not rational. People trust the Internet and systems of e-mail with regard to certainty of operation and privacy in ways that are not justifiable under the presumption of absolute trustworthiness. When our expectations are frustrated, we are not likely to assess it as a matter of misplaced trust. No, we are pissed off about it and attribute the situation to some one or some thing, anyone but ourselves as willfully trusting. Look at the distrust of Microsoft (actually, a highly trustworthy organization in a number of respects) and the almost blind assumption that any alternative will be more trustworthy. Look at the entertainment industry's unwillingness to trust the public and its drive to find an absolutely trustworthy arrangement enforced by technical means and legislated monopolies. And they have a point, and the ultimate resolution of public policy and practice in the matter will have a tremendous impact. Trust is a game. An important aspect of being trustworthy is the inability to defect. The prisoner's dillema comes to mind. This game or puzzle is basically one of trust relationships. The appropriate tit-for-tat strategy arises when the parties cannot defect from the game. This arose in Gorbachov's approach to Perestroika concerning nuclear testing programs. The intriguing element is that Gorbachov announced that the Soviets were playing tit-for-tat: you test, we test, you stop testing, we stop testing -- we've stopped test, your move. It was all very clear. Now, if the Russians were crazy and it was all a ruse to set us up for a first strike, well that isn't about trust, that's about our untrusting of them. Trust is about vulnerability. Here's a good place to stop. Trustworthiness, it seems to me, is based on an on-going relationship. If there is not an appropriate relationship (as when trading horses or buying toothpaste at the supermarket), one may be established as a matter of enforced law (as in product liability, environmental-protection regulations, and enforceability of contracts). There is no basis for trustworthiness without an ability to trust that breaches will be cured. It may be that the whole approach to trustworthiness is about that -- repair of breaches and how the trusted party affirms and demonstrates trustworthiness. And to get to that, and to sustain that, there is always the requirement to be trusting. So, who do you trust?. I have a list. It is a peculiar list. It is my irrational trust record. You have lists with the same names on it, and probably a different irrational assignment of categories. I'm not going to explain it. I am certainly not going to justify it. Look it over and see where your visceral reactions are and what that says about your sense of trust and trustworthiness. The people/organizations I don't trust (at the moment): Larry Ellison (Oracle), Scott McNeally (Sun), Steve Case (AOL Time-Warner), Disney and the MPAA, the RIAA, The United States Congress, Richard Stallman, and George W. Bush. People/organizations I do trust (at the moment): Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly & Associates), the Internal Revenue Service, my fellow 'mericans, Eric Raymond, and Jimmy Carter. Subjective trust. I probably should not have done that. In some cases, I actually have a trust relationship that extends to those people. In other cases it is a matter of indifference and there is no pertinent relationship. And there are relationships from which I cannot defect, yet the other party has no discernable trust relationship to me. That gives me a lot to look at in terms of what I can influence. And it demonstrates to me how opinionated I am. How about you? 2002-11-19Collaborative SystemsBlogging, Logging, and SharingMore gleanings on wikified blogging with feeding provisions. Huh?Web styleI notice that bloggers and many other sites make increasing use of style sheets. Some of it is really annoying. I like the result, usually. I am concerned about the interoperability and presentability aspects, especially around the default behavior for browsers and other clients that don't recognize the style sheets.CNET - Web Building - Authoring & Site Design - Get Started With Cascading Style Sheets. It is about time I learned how to use these. It would make some things I do much simpler. I think. What I need to keep my attention on is having pages that still work for earlier versions of HTML. olshansky's Journal. I have no idea what this journal/blog has in it. It's all in Russian. On the other hand, it demonstrates the Unicode workings of Live Journal, which I find has everything also in RSS format and is an open-source implementation. That is what caught my attention. More to follow ... Meerkat: An Open Wire Service. This is an RSS site, so I looked to see what it's autodiscovery entry is like. It is the link tag in the header:
This demonstrates that there is nothing magical about the alternative URL, and it could be to something that generates the material on the fly, so long as it satisfies the RSS requirement. An ASP page would work. More hmm... Top 100 Most-Subscribed-To RSS Feeds. Hmm, there is some sort of referer tracking going on, plus the aggregator is monitoring what the aggregation clients are "subscribed" to, perhaps? Not sure about the security aspects of this. The Shifted Librarian: Thursday, May 30, 2002. A nice site. Cool calendar, categories on posts, and RSS and stuff. And it is by/about librarians. I'd buy the T-shirt if it had the "Look it up" image on the back and a version of the long description about the power of librarians. dive into mark/June 02, 2002: RSS Autodiscovery Link Tag. Interesting. This all came into existence in a matter of days, it would seem. This posting describes the complete link tag and its proper use to identify where RSS feeds can be found on a Web site. That takes care of the basic logistics. Getting the RSS file format generated is the next step. dive into mark/May 31, 2002: RSS Auto-discovery A web log entry with a collection of posts on RSS auto-discovery. AmphetaDesk - Finding More Channels This is nice documentation. I feel myself slipping down the primrose path just like that. (Sounds of Grace Slick and White Rabbit in the background.) There are a variety of arbitrary sources, which are apparently file-based and backed up (sometime) by a web page, so you might be able to move to a feed item in web form and blog it. (This could be a "permanent location".) There is more on the auto-discover technique. AmphetaDesk - Integrating Your Website. Hmm, it seems that the feed from a web site is a passive thing. That is, it is the client that does all of the work, once being told where the feed sits on the web site. Then it would seem what there is to do is build the RSS-formatted XML file at some place on a site and update it periodically. How timing and the difference between new and old is handled is yet to be understood. More documentation to read, I think. AmphetaDesk. Oh boy, now I find out what all of this RSS feed business is about. Here is a highly-rated News headline channeler or whatever, that will get the headlines and links from selected sources. There seem to be lots of selectable sources. There are ways to make a web site accessible, and that interests me first, perhaps. And a way to integrate it with Wikified Blogging. Distributed Objects.NET object coordinationBuilder: Code Access Security Performance. An older article that looks at how the CLR verifies permission on any access to a protected resource. Because Miser applications are highly recursive, even with tail recursion, the checking of deep call chains is a concern. It looks like the approach of requesting permissions in advance may not be applicable in most Miser cases. This will be something to look at more closely too, in the context that, because objects are distributed, how they operate with resources at a point of use is a problem to be dealt with somehow. It may not be possible to avoid this overhead in those cases. It is also not clear where permissions get attached when a remote object is being used to operate with a local protected resource. Hmm. ...Custom Caching with .NET. Well, maybe it isn't quite what I was worrying about. This may have to do with making use of the Cache class that .NET provides. So my concerns may not apply. Still not sure. It seemed that the more-recent article was talking about caching objects and how it happens automatically. OK, keep looking, and remember to review this at some point -- orcmid Builder: Caching with .NET - Expiring Objects. Hmm, there is a suggestion in here that objects can stay cached forever in .NET. That's not supposed to be true, or there is some confusion. But having to build scavenger objects, explicitly set expirations, and so on strikes me as way too far into the bowels for applications to be operating. There is more to figure out here. I want to understand the CLR and the .NET Framework, both as a vehicle for C# usage but also as a possible platform for Miser, which has the potential for reliance on lots of fine-grained distributed objects. I need to understand how to deal with this in the Miser model, where many objects (or, at least, their interfaces) come into being quite dynamically. Something for me not to lose sight of as I explore the rules of .NET and the CLR. Garbage collection and object lifecyclesDBLP: Henry G. Baker. Nice reverse-chronological bibliography that counts 22 items from 1977 until 1998.Garbage Collection FAQ -- draft. There must be a Henry Baker citation in here some where. I am not that concerned about garbage collection because of its inherent availability in .NET CLR and Java technologies. A handy reference though. Lively Linear Lisp - 'Look Ma, No Garbage!' - Baker (ResearchIndex). Hmm, something to dig into. I am running into some assignment-like functions in Resources for Programming Language Research. A very cool page with a λ symbol. Comprehensive tree of resources. Just what I need to fuel the Miser Project. Henry Baker's Archive of Research Papers. Ah, I had been looking for Henry G. Baker before and given up. A comment on Owen Densmore's web site reminded me of that and I made use of Kartoo to make a better search. Training and DevelopmentEducation versus InstructionMentoringWelcome to RMIT University. Formerly Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Beside using mentoring structures in some programs, this organization illustrates a trend in consortium creation among educational organizations.Work Integrated Learning: mentoring. More on mentoring practices, here as part of training on-the-job. Trust and Trustworthy ComputingSecurity sociologyTechRepublic: Consultant tightened security two ways after virus attack. What it takes to operate with the human element. (Access may require registration.)2002-11-18Project Management InformationProject Management Office - Organization Friendly Design. Sometimes these pages won't save, so I need to clip them.Public-Format Document ProcessingI am very interested in tools and formats (and protocols) for interoperable document processing using public formats. That starts with raw text and works its way up.Word-Processing DocumentsMaybe word-processing documents will soon become XML and nothing but XML. Based on the difficulty of SGML being a successful public format, I would want to hedge my bet on that. Finding traditional word-processor formats that are successful public formats becomes an important challenge. I would like WYSIWYG, but I think that Microsoft has demonstrated that the notion is either fraudulent or too difficult, I can't tell which. Maybe it means that Microsoft Office doesn't actually accomplish WYSIWYG. Could that be it?Either way, I am looking for a public editable (word-processing) document format. For my own purposes, the simpler the better. AbiWord prospectsAbiWord: Download. The download for Windows is 3.9MB and appears to be cleanly done, using standard installer procedures. It uninstalls and it has plugins and language packs. More to study.One possible application, if AbiWord uses templates, is to find an alternative to RTF and generic printers for creating Internet Drafts. I have been sorely frustrated in my inability to get an RTF document to produce the right kind of formatted simple text file. There was a time when this was the easiest thing to do with a word processor or a markup system (such as ROFF). Now, not only is it not the case that What I See Is What I Get, but I can't get specifically what I want no how, no way. The bigger part of it is that there could be an increase in interoperability that way. I can see that I am talking myself into something here. I wonder how difficult it would be to make AbiWord an ODMA client. Heh. AbiWord Offering Word Processing for Everyone. I don't know about that, and some of the biggest open problems are rendering things like tables. Depending on the plug-in structure, this could be interesting as a harness for open-interoperability document processing though. Something to keep an eye on and maybe even try out for simple applications, like replacing my use of Microsoft Works, the old one that I still operate and have files in. Salon.com Technology | AbiWord up. Kudos for the AbiWord effort and its provision of multiple formats, other capabilities that keep it going although not so feature-rich. Trust and SecurityThis is an on-going theme in my studies and writing.Operating-system security exposuresStudy: Linux' Security Problems Outstrip Microsoft's. The math quoted in here doesn't seem to stack up based on the Microsoft Security Alerts that I receive. At the same time, this is plausible and was predicted by security experts. I can't wait to see how this shows up on Slashdot.Running nakedWired News: Wi-Fi Encryption Fix Not Perfect. The article continues to indicate that, with all of the vulnerabilities, and they are considerable and already being exploited, WiFi deployment will continue on campuses and in homes. A trust issue? I would think so.What seems clear is that the social behaviors that have systems remain insecure are still operating and that there is no indication of that changing with WiFi, not matter how rapidly widespread it will become. This is a weird situation. It is like the movies and the notions of cyberspace that were envisioned by science-fiction writers more than anything imagined by computer visionaries. Or I have been overlooking the accurate visionaries. Intrusion detection and network monitoringSnort.org Snort Intrusion Detection. An open source network intrusion detection system.Nmap -- Downloads. The full skinny on Nmap downloads, including one with a Windows UI. Provides links to WinPcap information. The command line version can also be run on windows with the front-end. Windows Packet Capture Library - Credits. provides links to predecessors and other sites that may be sources on network analysis software and information. WinDump: tcpdump for Windows. A sniffer package that watches, analyzes, and captures network traffic. Useful for detecting intrusions, unexpected network traffic, and so on. Now maybe I can figure out why MSN Messenger sends out packets even when I am logged off of MSN Messenger. . Articles and Links related to Network Tools. Amazing. WinPcap, Snort, Analyzer, WinDump, interpreting and analyzing, more tools. Amazing. The Register - Raw Sockets and MS Security. An interview with Scott Culp about Raw Sockets in Windows XP. polito.it - Politechnico di Torino NetGroup. More about the work on networks done here, including useful links to research projects. Polito.it Netgroup Tools. Hmm, digging down into all there is about monitoring and using the low-level packet drivers on a system. Nmap -- Free Stealth Port Scanner For Network Exploration & Security Audits. Runs on Linux/Windows/UNIX/Solaris/FreeBSD/OpenBSD. Not sure whether the good guys or the bad guys get the most use out of this popular tool. It looks like it would be valuable in autodiscovery and finding out what my computers are doing on the network, so I wll find out more. Insecure.Org -- Nmap Free Stealth Network Port Scanner,Linux/Windows/UNIX/Solaris Tools & Hacking. Has a survey of top 50 security tools. AntiOnline's Fight-Back! - Computer Security - Hacking & Hackers. A compendium of ways to fight off Hackers. Symantec Security Response - Hacktool. A short note from Symantec on Hack tools and how to delete them, with links to more details on safe mode operation. Configuration ManagementNetwork ManagementActive network diagramsI want to diagram my network, working from the physical wiring on up to the computers connections. There are articles that suggest using the ISO Open-Systems Integration architecture as a way to catch everything. That looks good. There are also tools that may work for depicting the arrangement further up the protocol stack and giving visibility on how the systems are interconnected.Network Notepad . A free network diagramming tool that can be used as an active document. Business, System and Project PlanningFinancial, Business, and Strategy PlanningExl-Plan for Simple Business PlansExl-Plan Installation Notes. Useful for working through an installation, especially setting macro levels properly in Excel. Ah, a trust point.Exl-Plan Downloads: Trial & Freeware Versions. These directions are a little clunky. I get that there is an effort to provide everything I might need to know. Has me wonder about reviewing my pages of this sort. The previously clipped page is needed to register the trial downloads. You must go through an installation process to get a product code before you can do this. Has an odd flavor to it. Exl-Plan Free - Download/Register. (Thought for a moment that Blogger was back at speed, but it is slow again.) PlanWare - Business & Financial Planning Freeware. Nice little hierarcy of financial, business, and strategic planning. Free versions for trial and simple cases. This can be used for many kinds of planning activities. Business Plan Software, Free Templates and More ... A site of reports and software from Invest-Tech Limited, in Dublin. (Blogger is painfully slow right now.) TechRepublic - Creating Business Plans Gets Easier with the Right Tool. An article that illustrates the use of a particular software package for business planning. This is useful for consulting projects (I think) and for project management in the small. So I clip this kind of thing. TechRepublic access requires registration. 2002-11-17Software Development Management ToolsBug Tracking SoftwareWide seardh for Jitterbugh14m.org Bug Tracking System - main page. JitterBug with a Hack to support Japanese (in Japanese).Webliography Software Engineering. Yummy. Monster set of organized links that happen to include Bug Tracking down in the bowels. Very nice page on software engineering. I must remember to link my SE resources page to it when I am ready to post one. Yahoo! Search Results for "bug tracking". Searches that bring up other people's search results. My, my. A very big search result too, if the numbers are to be believed. Software Testing FAQ: Defect Tracking Tools. A very long list of bug trackers, proprietary and otherwise. Google Directory - Computers > Software > Configuration Management > Bug Tracking > Free. A Google index of free bug trackers. More, more, more. Dave Eaton's Problem Management Tools Summary. Hey, here's Dave! Found as part of a web search for more on JitterBug. JitterBug README. Gathering in more good material. The directory also has the tar.gz file for the JitterBug 1.6.2 release, dated 1998-11-25. JitterBug.txt. Ah, there you are. The offered ftp URL doesn't work, but this http one find the desired place. JitterBug FAQ. Here's one text file and a location for it. Maybe I can use this link to find the other materials. Dave Eaton's Problem Management Tools Summary. Well, that doesn't seem to be what is here now. On Compagno, my laptop with the firewall, I got a page that said I couldn't get in because my browser had refused a session cookie. Sorry, Charlie, my browser is only refusing 3d party cookies, another story altogether. I say this page lied to me. Try the link yourself. JitterBug - Message 599 - Future Developments. This 1998 note on switching to a template model suggests that Jitterbug would port to ASP very easily. I will need to find out how true that actually is. Maybe once I get ftp URLs to work. Jitterbug bug trackerThe only difficulty I have with Jitterbug is that some of its links hang my browser. These are all ftp URLs that somehow don't work. I run into that from time to time. It could be that my firewall is blocking them. I will have to check that out.Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux. A comprehensive description of the different kinds of tools and some links to available components. Lots more to look at. JitterBug. I had to rearrange some things while dealing with browser hangs and then a time-keeping problem in Blogger. Here are the goods on the second free bug tracker. There are other useful links here too. Jitterbug is a more Spartan approach, which runs as a CGI program and does not require a database. This means there are a few ways that I could run it on my server, so I am keen to know more. It is not so feature rich, but that may not be a problem at this point. Also, a port to ASP and JavaScript might be feasible. Troubleshooting Blogger - AgainOK, I give up. Blogger is stuck between two ways of telling time. It doesn't think I have anything on 11/17 after about 5:35 am (clearly not local time), and it won't show me the material that I added today that is really on the afternoon and evening of 11/17. It also won't show me anything on the 18th, which it is already (GMT). When I publish everything the material is there, I just cat get it into the edit window!When I give up asking for a date and ask to see the last xx posts, I can find my stuff. Sigh. Bugzilla Project. The Mozilla-produced bug tracker package, Bugzilla. Open Source. Requires MySQL. A high-function free package. I want something like this to make my bug-handling more efficient on DMware. Also, I could provide Web Forms for other people to make submissions. Just starting to look at this, though. Three free bug-tracking tools. I think these articles require some sort of log-on, but I wnat to acknowledge the materials that lead me to other clippings here. We'll see if the link is generally usable or requires registration. Loose EndsA Linux-PAM page. "This is the primary distribution site for the Linux-PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules for Linux) project. (The ftp version of this site is ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/.)" I don't know, schemes of pluggable authentication modules keep coming to my attention, and here is another one.XML ProcessingSearching for ToolsHere's more in my on-going search for XML-related processing tools, editors, and so on.Jelly for XML as scriptsforehead: java classloader framework - Forehead Usage. Hmm, a utility that is needed with Jelly, perhaps. Interesting topic for getting way into the syntactic knowledge that goes with Java toolcraft.Jelly - Jelly : Executable XML. I thought we got into all this trouble with executable code inside of Microsoft Word and then in HTML delivered to browsers and mail systems, etc. Well, I don't know how one deals with this case, but I guess I should figure it out at some point. Electric XML processing libraryThe Mind Electric�. Hmm, well, it doesn't qualify as open-source, because there are restrictions on use. I think I will avoid this for now. I know where to find it if I need to.The Mind Electric�. Well the licensing language for Glue is clear enough. I won't touch it because of potential IP collisions based on the no-reverse-engineering clause, etc. A minor annoyance -- once you move to a license/registration page, this site won't let me back out to where I came in. The Mind Electric�. Site of information on Glue, Gaia, and Electric XML. I am interested in the merits of Electric XML for basic functionality, depending on its licensing. SuonoIs Italian for "play" as in play of a keyboard instrument.Music-Related SitesSince I recently looked at the Madonna site (as a promotion by the people who designed it), and another one on Music Videos, here is more. I also loaded up more favorite Internet Radio into Media Player this afternoon, while taking a deserved break.The Experience Music ProjectEMP: Experience Music Project. Looking at some new offerings in fancy web sites, I was reminded of this one to bookmark. Useful to visit the site every few weeks.I got lost exploring the history of "Louie Louie" and a few other great things. EMP is very focused on the Pacific Northwest contribution to rock and roll. Until I visited the place, I didn't realize that the Ventures and other early garage bands were from my home town, and we were close in school.
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